Watertown republican. [volume] (Watertown, Wis.) 1860-1906, 1887-03-16
HUNTING AN ICHTHYOSAURUS.

Il
OF joining a party about to stalt out
along the banks of Bitter Greek on a
hunting expedition. The leader of the
party was young man who had re-
Gently escaped from college with large
amount of knowledge which he desired
to experiment with on the people of
the far West He had heard that there
was an ichthyosaurus up somewhere
along the west side of Bitter Greek, and
he wanted US to go along and help him
to find it.
L had been in the West some eight or
nine years then and I had never seen
an ichthyosaurus myself, but thought
the young man must know his business,
SO L got out my Winchester and went
along with the group.
We tramped over the pale, ashy,
glaring, staring stretch of desolation,
through burning, quivering days of
monotony and saoebrush and alkali
water and aching eyes and parched and
bleeding lips and nostrils cut through
and eaten by the sharp alkaline air,
mentally depressed and physically worn
out, but cheered on and braced up by
the light and joyous manner of the
over-hopeful James Trilobite Elton Of
Concord.
James Trilobite Elton of Concord
never moaned, never gigged back or
shed O hot, remorseful tear in this
powdery, hungry waste of gray, parched
ruin. No regret came forth from his
lips in the midst of this mighty ceme-
terry, this CHASTITY potter's field for all
that nature had ever reared that was
too poor to bear it's own funeral ex-
penses.
Now and then lean, soiled, gray
coyote, without sufficient moral courage
to look dead mule in the hind foot,
slipped across the horizon like dirty
phantom and faded into the hot and
tremulous atmosphere. We scorned
such game as that and trudged on,
cheered by the hope that seemed to
spring eternal in the breast of James
Trilobite Elton of Concord
-Four days we wallowed through the
unchanging desolation. Four nights
we went through the motions of
slumbering on the arid bosom of the
wasted earth. On the fifth day James
Trilobite Elton said we were now getting
near the point where we would find
what we sought. On we pressed
through the keen, rough blades of the
seldom bunchgrass, over the shifting,
yellow sand and the greenish gray of
the bad-land soil which never does any
thing but sit around through the &C
cumulating centuries and hold the
world together, a kind of powdery
hok Ill, BE- b. - |,
nostrils of the pilgrim and steal away
his brains, OF when moistened by a
little snow to accumulate around the
feet of the pilgrim or on the feet of the
pilgrims mule till he has the most of
an unsurveyed forty" on each foot, and
the casual observer is cheered by the
novel sight of one homestead striving
to jump another.
Toward evening James Trilobite Elton
gave wild shrek of Joy and ran to us
from the bed of aa old creek, where he
had found an ichthyosaurus. The
animal was dead! Not only that, but
it had been dead long, long time!
James Milton Sherrod said that eff
college education was of no more use to
man than that, he, for one, allowed
that his boy would have to grope
through life with an ACCIDENTAL educa-
tion, and very little of It,"
unlocked my gun and went back to
camp a sadder and madden man, and,
though years have come and gone, I am
still irritable when / think of the five
days we tramped along Bitter Greek
searching for an animal that was no
longer alive, and our guide knew it be-
fore he started.
Iventured to say to j. Tri1obite Elton
that night as we all sat together in the
cleaning discussing whether he should
be taken home with us in the capacity
of a guide or as a remains, that it
seemed to me a man ought to have
better sense than to wear his young life
away trying to have fun with his
superiors in that way.
"Why, blame it ALL" says James,
"what did you expect? You ought to
know yourself that that animal is ex-
tinctw
"Extinck" says James Milton
Sherrod, in shrill, angry tones. IT
should say he was extinck. That's
what we're kickin' about. What gallded
me was that you should of waited till
the old cuss was extinck before you
come to us like man and told us about
it. You pull us through the sand for a
week and blister our heels and condemn
near kill US, and all the time you know
that the blame brute is layin' there in
the hot sun gittin' more and more ex-
timex every minute. Fun is fun, and
like little nonsense now and then Just
as we'll as you do, but I'll be eternally
banished to Bitter Greek if think it's
square or right or white to play it on
your friends this kind of way.
"You claim that the animal has been
dead goin' on 5000 years, or some such
thing as that, and try to get out of it
that way, but long as you knew it and
we didn't, it shows that you're low
cuss not to speak of it.
What difference does it make to u.s.
I say, whether this brute was or was
not dead and swelled up like pizen'd
steer long before More got his zoologickle
show together? We didn't know it.
We haven't seen the Salt Lake papers
for weeks. You Use your education to
fool naon1e with NV o,liniOn ia that